Adventure Magazine Cover, October 10, 1921 — page 30: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

20 of night to stand on rank and ceremony anyhow. Steve Adams busied himself writing to friends in the north. Tupper and Shay loafed about while Wilcox went over his accounts at the long table, aided by a single lamp. Otherwise the great room was dark except for soft lights aan e from the fire- place. The men talked in ce, voices while the window-panes rattled. Then there was a long silence. At last Tupper began crooning the ‘‘Cowboy’s Lament” and other doleful chants from the great, lonesome, silent lands that produced a minstrelsy all their own. , He sang of death and misadventure. He sang of blue-eyed Sister Sue, and the mother who is in the grave, and the girl who went astray, and the puncher who breathed his jast and wanted to be buried in the lone prair-ee. He sang of sad farewells. He sang of gambling, drink, bullet-wounds, broken necks, debt, disaster, and every other dismal, hopeless, horrible heart-throb in the exaggerated poetry of the old cattle ranges, where the cow-puncher translated the eternal silence of earth and stars into melancholy melodies all his own. Grant Wilcox didn’t notice it for a long time, but finally it dinned into his ears, an insistent monotone that vied with the soughing of the frantic winds. The boss stood it patiently, but at last even his en- durance gave way. “Stop it,” he begged, looking up from his work. There was another long silence. Suddenly a savage, throbbing howl arose from outside, piercing the voice of the winds and tearing it to pieces. It was a weird, blood-curdling shriek calculated to crinkle the hair, tighten the pulse and send icy waves running up and down the spine. “A wolf,” explained Old Man Shay. The fiendish noise doubled, trebled, quadrupled, multiplied. The sinister ca- dences trembled up and down the scale, moaned, wailed, screamed and fell again in a supplicating devil’s lament that sounded like the lost souls of all the world’s existence. “Two wolves,” tallied Shay. “Two?” questioned the boss. “Yeh,” agreed ‘Tupper. ‘Sounds like a million, but it ain’t only two. Wolves ain’t mathematical. They don’t add up like they ought.” Adventure “Explain.” “Well, take one wolf. It makes a certain amount o’ noise. Take two wolves. They ought to make twice as much noise as one wolf but they don’t. They make forty times as much.” “Take three wolves. They make a hun- dred times as much noise as two wolves. Take four wolves. They make two hundred times as much. Now, how much noise would a million wolves make?” “T give up.” “Same as four wolves. There ain’t nothin’ in the world can make more noise’n four wolves!” The wolves were still howling when the men went to their bunk-house and left the boss alone, and the winds still shrieked and roared. The calm master of the house put away his papers, wound his watch, and picked up his lamp. He halted for a moment at the mantel and looked silently at a photo- graph of a sweet-faced woman under the great portrait of Jim Wilcox. Then he sought his bedroom. Hours later he awoke. There was a muffled pounding on the distant front door. Wilcox sat up. His eyes tried to pierce the darkness. A distant voice seemed to call. Wilcox arose silently, lit a lamp, went into the front room and approached the front door where some one was banging madly. Wilcox didn’t usually lock that door, but the winds had demanded that it be held tight. Now he opened it. The rays of the flickering lamp glinted on a monstrous fluffy black Thing staggering as the cold wind blew inward through the doorway. It was a creature on two legs but looking like nothing that walks above ground. Its head was streaked with black. Two frantic eyes glared insanely beneath a shining fore- head covered by tiny white feathers. The great body was the color of coal, flecked by myriads of gray and white fuzz. A few of the spots blew off and swirled through the door. The monstrosity opened its mouth. “For sake give me a drink!” Wilcox looked again into the creature’s face, then dragged him inside and turned the lock. It was the editor of the town newspaper. He had been tarred and feathered. Gomiicivook C@